Why is the smoke preview not showing in Blender's viewport?
Found the solution!

It was simply the case that Blender no longer used the updated AMD GPU as the primary card when running Blender, and instead used the Intel card which was not up to date. Consequently parts of Blender which require OpenGL (such as the viewport smoke simulation or OpenGL render, in my case) will not display correctly, or will throw up errors when used. This is easy to fix by reconfiguring which card is used when running the app.

This was the steps taken for my Windows 7 x64 laptop.

1) Right Click on the Desktop, select the Graphics Properties option from the drop down menu. Note: If there is a Configure Switchable Graphics option (as shown in the screenshot), click that instead and skip to step 3.



2) Under the Power tab, click Switchable Graphics Application Settings.



3) This will bring you to a window with Recent Applications and All Applications drop down menus. Don't be fooled if you see Blender in the 'all applications' menu, if there are multiple versions saved on the same machine yet under different file locations, you will sometimes need to configure each individually. To do this click the Add Application button by the dropdown.



4) Navigate to the file location that the Blender Version is saved at. Select the app and hit Open.



5) When you do this you will be brought back to the All Applications drop down menu. The selected app will now be highlighted (in this case it is the same app as was already on the list at the outset) and will have a drop down menu on the right hand side. Click the menu and choose High Performance. This will set the AMD graphics card as the primary driver used when running Blender.



6) Click Apply and restart Blender. This should hopefully fix any issues, however you may need to repeat the process when installing later versions! :)